Well, we already had the comparison to socialism, and I thought to myself "I wonder how long before someone compares it to gun control?"
Can't we get through an article on the UK without someone bringing up socialism or gun control? Yes, a weapon designed to kill people is obviously comparable to a computer program.
Last time I looked, the US bans all sorts of weapons, and by your reasoning therefore also has a large precedent with the concept that TOOLS are the problem rather than the USERS. Shall I bring up the fact that I can't have my own personal missile launcher in every story on the US?
Oh please. The UK Labour Government has been on an authoritarian march for some years now, and it's nothing to do with socialism. The UK is not socialist.
The US has also sadly been becoming increasingly authoritarian too, is that due to socialism too? Last time I heard, alcohol and tobacco were considered harmful in the US (and you may have heard of this little thing of "the war on drugs"), and there are plenty of people trying to ban abortion.
LiveJournal at least has a lot more than "social networking" though, and isn't covered by emailing or texting (I'm not sure how anyone could see the latter as an improvement when you have online access btw). You might as well describe Slashdot as a "social networking" site because we have profiles, you can add "Friends", etc... People could also say the same things about being addicted.
Any additions are being deleted because they don't contain PC(pol.correct) language.
On the contrary, Wikipedia is not censored. Generally I see great resistance from editors if someone tries to delete something on the grounds that it might offend someone (e.g., notably those cartoons of Mohammed).
Yes, but in Back to the Future, there wasn't a real need to explain how large "giga" really was, it was just there as a scientific-sounding buzzword. So whilst using the term in this article might have made people become familiar with the word, they wouldn't have any idea what size it actually meant.
People didn't become familiar with Gigabyte because of Back to the Future anyway, they are familiar with it because that's what they now buy hard drives and ipods in. When they are sold in Exabytes, you'll see the term used in journalism too.
So it is only logical that some people will develop a taste for kiddie porn once they see some of it.
Though I'm sure that most people have heard of the idea of child abuse. I think it is a non-sequitor to go from examples of ideas, to seeing it graphically.
Indeed, by this logic, all this campaigning and witchhunting against child porn and child abuse is creating more pedophiles, so we should stop it all and say nothing!
Just to make some general comments on the story - the intro says "online pornography and violent websites", then it says "pornography and inappropriate material", and then we get the comment about child porn. I wonder which we are talking about? Adult porn or fictional violence isn't the same thing at all as child porn (though in both cases, I'm not too bothered if they filter them for schools); "inappropriate material" could be anything.
It's unclear whether this is simply mandatory for ISPs to optionally provide, or whether it will be mandatory to use. Even with the former, there are the issues that it may be on by default, or some ISPs might not bother with the hassle of allowing you to opt-out, or it will be advertised as a "child porn" filter even if it filters much more.
Yup, just as I predicted. I said runaway capitalism is the problem, and you knee jerked right into "he is saying capitalism is the problem."
Yes, I know you probably were home schooled, but your parents should have told you the difference between "x" and "runaway x".
You said "capitalism fails miserably", not runaway capitalism - I don't know what that is anyway, as other commenters pointed out, the US is far from an extreme or runaway capitalist society. You also appear to have knee-jerked into defending the need for a Government; I can't see where I suggested I was an anarchist(!)
The crappy state school education of myself and the other commenters obviously didn't teach us what the technical economic definition of "Runaway Capitalism", so perhaps you could explain to us - preferably without resorting to a car analogy, please.
I would also be curious to know how the lack of chip fabs for everyone is due to greed?
And please stick to the debate rather than ad hominems.
Good luck building your own fab. Apparently only a trillionaire can afford such simple freedoms.
This is clearly an example where capitalism fails miserably.
What - it's capitalism's fault that building advanced processors requires vast amounts of resources? Feel free to propose your own alternative system where money and fabs grow on trees.
(Uh oh, here come the angry "Capitalism is God, how dare you infidels question the market!" right wing Republo-jihadists with mod points...)
(Well I'll wait for the the angry "Capitalism is the root of all our problems, how dare you infidels defend it!" left wing Communist-jihadists with mod points.)
I have no problem if they want to block hardcore porn, but what about other material that might be deemed "adult" or "offensive to some people who like to complain about it"? And surely we know here on Slashdot that blocking software is often inexact, either mistakenly or unfairly blocking things?
Er, but isn't one of Einstein's most famous quotations "God doesn't play dice with the universe?" - a comment he apparently made repeatedly.
I also say "God damn it" and "Jesus Christ" quite regularly, but I hope people like you won't be taking it as proof of belief in God after my death!
People often use "God" metaphorically, and scientists in particular have often used "God" as a personification of nature, in the same way that someone might refer to "mother nature".
As they say, your right to swing your arm ends just before my nose. Equally, your right to watch stuff on a plane ends when it starts to offend or disturb those flying with you.
In that case, I'm offended by you posting on Slashdot.
So how about this for an utterly radical idea - produce a passport that's in a convenient shape, and harder to forge!
Your argument is no justification for the various compulsory "ID card" schemes that various Governments around the world are trying to implement. People who oppose ID cards are not against standardisation of cards, or against making them in the shape of a card rather than a book(!) - it's the various other aspects (e.g., centralised databases, the cost, being compulsory to own or even carry).
He didn't do that. He used a metaphor - quite a common one at that - it's almost a cliché. I'm quite surprised you haven't heard it before. On second thoughts, I'm not.
If you're making an analogy in order to make an argument, I expect something a little stronger than a metaphor! If you're saying he merely made a metaphor, then his point does not hold in the first place.
Basicaly, MDI (and tabs are a kind of MDI) UIs were invented for a reason, and have their use cases And i find it irritating that many other applycations switched from MDI to SDI in the last years (eg: ms office, nero)... grrr...
I agree - similarly, it's annoying that some browsers that support tabs (e.g., Firefox) don't seem to do them as MDI, but use some custom-coded interface which lacks the standard features (e.g., you can no longer resize/rearrange the windows, if you wanted to look at two side by side) - at least, I can't find an option to enable this.
The oddest thing is that I've seen some people claiming this as a benefit - e.g., claiming that Firefox had tabs before Opera, because MDI doesn't count as tabs (now Opera can do tabs either with or without MDI, anyway).
It seems that admins are recently too happy with removing information from wiki, than adding it.
Er, the result of the AfD was Keep...
But I guess that biographies of fictional characters and detailed descriptions of Japanese cartoon episodes have much more important place on wikipedia.
This sounds like a strawman, but direct your criticisms at the submitter of this Slashdot article, who voted Delete, and presumably is unhappy with the result. His summary is misleading - there is no big "argument" about getting rid of proofs - there was just an AfD of a single artice, he wanted it deleted, but the overall consensus was to keep.
In fact, in my experience biographies of fictional characters etc are far more likely to get deleted for non-notability than mathematical proofs.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be.
Sure - and they already have asked this, and put a lot of thought into it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not , for example. The person who proposed the article thought that the proof made it count as a "textbook", but others pointed out that this didn't fall under "articles which read as textbooks, with leading questions and step-by-step problem solutions as examples".
But I'm curious why this issue is even on Slashdot - perhaps we should ask what sort of site Slashdot wants to be?;) This isn't some great policy wide debate on Wikipedia, it's just the AfD of an individual article. Someone thought it shouldn't be there because of the policy, and the consensus disagreed. Big deal.
In fact, we can see the user Beetle B. voted delete - and now because the result was to Keep, he's running to Slashdot? (Okay, at least he's phrased it as an open debate - but it's not clear that this is some big "argument", and it's not clear a policy is needed specifically for mathematical proofs. Above all, this is the sort of thing that should be discussed on Wikipedia, not on Slashdot...)
Just because LiveJournal sells something doesn't mean people are buying.
Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).
Not me, but people do buy. I don't think there are any official figures, but http://news.livejournal.com/100876.html suggests that the number of permanent accounts sold last time has a lower bound of 1040.
One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change....
Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.
I'm not sure what evidence this is based on? On the contrary, to some degree people are locked in, in that you need an account to access all your friends' content, and a new site is only worth as much as who you know is on it.
I don't think I've seen any less loyalty on them than people have with any other site. LiveJournal even sells "permanent accounts" for $150, so there are people coughing up money for a long term commitment, more so than any other website I've seen.
Your statement makes about as much sense as saying the only reason for having a Slashdot account is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Who would go to all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a Slashdot account for any other reason? Look at you with your +5 by writing a trendy bashing of social networking, if that's not attention whoring?
Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitute for the telephone, email or instant messaging.
Okay I'll bite: Why? Email is push rather than pull. Instant message requires everyone you want to address to be online at that moment, and telephone is even worse, being only one-on-one.
The pull rather than push is important - rather than me deciding who would want to read whatever I want to tell them, people I know can decide for themselves. In fact, it's email which is far more likely to represent ego satisfying, validation and attention whoring, in that you send out messages flooding people's inboxes, assuming they care about your petty life. Same with telephone and IM really.
It's sad really, I'd have thought that geeks would be willing to accept that some uses of technology may be more appropriate than others (even if it's not for them, it may be for others), rather than giving in to impressions of what's trendy and what isn't (what sort of technical criticism is "attention-whoring"? That's the sort of thing people take the piss out of MySpace for).
If there's only two people watching an article (you and someone else) and you disagree, get more people involved (there are places to request editors to look it over).
Moderation isn't needed, when you can edit or revert. I'm not sure why marking the best edit or editor is useful? What's important is the resultant article, not which particular edits in the history were the best.
If a straw poll is needed, that can be done on the Talk page - whilst a system to automate this might seem useful, it's important to remember that opinions are also important, not just a simple count of votes.
As for TFA, it states "One has to wonder how reliable an encyclopaedia is when it peddles government propaganda in an almost Orwellian manner"; Seems a bit like FUD to me.
Agreed - the POV in the Wikipedia page was reverted a few hours later. The POV in the Inquirer article is still there, well over a day later, and seems unlikely to ever be changed.
It's only possible for them to find this by digging into the history - how many bloopers could we find in other sources, if their entire history was easily searchable to all?
Without a rating they can't release it. Without a rating no console would even certify it.
Without a rating, it isn't legal to sell it in the UK. This goes way beyond the certification issues in the US.
But anyhow, that was my point - given that they have no chance of making any money if they can't sell it, I don't see how they can be accused of doing it to grab publicity and make a profit, as the OP suggested.
It's their own stupid fault for producing this game in the first place. Censorship is not some new phenomenon, something that appeared after they started work on Manhunt 2. It's a reality and should have been considered before they embarked on this money pit.
I'm not sure how this relates to what I wrote at all. I wasn't given them sympathy because they won't make any money. I was criticising Government censorship (yes, the laws do stem from Victorian times, I'm not sure that's a good thing), and saying I'm glad that some companies aren't willing to self-censor themselves, even though it means risking not being able to sell it.
If Penguin Books hadn't been willing to challenge the UK censorship laws and instead took the attitude "It's a reality and should have been considered before they embarked on this money pit.", we'd still be living in a country where publishing literature risked prosecution under obscenity laws for too many "fuck"s.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we already had the comparison to socialism, and I thought to myself "I wonder how long before someone compares it to gun control?"
Can't we get through an article on the UK without someone bringing up socialism or gun control? Yes, a weapon designed to kill people is obviously comparable to a computer program.
Last time I looked, the US bans all sorts of weapons, and by your reasoning therefore also has a large precedent with the concept that TOOLS are the problem rather than the USERS. Shall I bring up the fact that I can't have my own personal missile launcher in every story on the US?
Oh please. The UK Labour Government has been on an authoritarian march for some years now, and it's nothing to do with socialism. The UK is not socialist.
The US has also sadly been becoming increasingly authoritarian too, is that due to socialism too? Last time I heard, alcohol and tobacco were considered harmful in the US (and you may have heard of this little thing of "the war on drugs"), and there are plenty of people trying to ban abortion.
What ever happened to email or mobile phone text?
LiveJournal at least has a lot more than "social networking" though, and isn't covered by emailing or texting (I'm not sure how anyone could see the latter as an improvement when you have online access btw). You might as well describe Slashdot as a "social networking" site because we have profiles, you can add "Friends", etc... People could also say the same things about being addicted.
But you're still here.
Any additions are being deleted because they don't contain PC(pol.correct) language.
On the contrary, Wikipedia is not censored. Generally I see great resistance from editors if someone tries to delete something on the grounds that it might offend someone (e.g., notably those cartoons of Mohammed).
Come to your wikipedia page?
you mean the one that you have been documented (and here) not only editing, but wiping clean the edit history on, trying to bury your tracks?
No - he said his talk page, not his Wikipedia article.
I'm fairly sure he was saying 1.21 Jigawatts anyway
:)
That's just a different way of pronouncing Gigawatts
Yes, but in Back to the Future, there wasn't a real need to explain how large "giga" really was, it was just there as a scientific-sounding buzzword. So whilst using the term in this article might have made people become familiar with the word, they wouldn't have any idea what size it actually meant.
People didn't become familiar with Gigabyte because of Back to the Future anyway, they are familiar with it because that's what they now buy hard drives and ipods in. When they are sold in Exabytes, you'll see the term used in journalism too.
So it is only logical that some people will develop a taste for kiddie porn once they see some of it.
Though I'm sure that most people have heard of the idea of child abuse. I think it is a non-sequitor to go from examples of ideas, to seeing it graphically.
Indeed, by this logic, all this campaigning and witchhunting against child porn and child abuse is creating more pedophiles, so we should stop it all and say nothing!
Just to make some general comments on the story - the intro says "online pornography and violent websites", then it says "pornography and inappropriate material", and then we get the comment about child porn. I wonder which we are talking about? Adult porn or fictional violence isn't the same thing at all as child porn (though in both cases, I'm not too bothered if they filter them for schools); "inappropriate material" could be anything.
It's unclear whether this is simply mandatory for ISPs to optionally provide, or whether it will be mandatory to use. Even with the former, there are the issues that it may be on by default, or some ISPs might not bother with the hassle of allowing you to opt-out, or it will be advertised as a "child porn" filter even if it filters much more.
Here in the UK we have similar fears - when debating plans to criminalise possession of "extreme" material considered inappropriate by the Government, MP Martin Salter called for "all PCs to be fitted with a blocking mechanism before they are sold on the open market - as cars are automatically fitted with seat belts" (look, a car analogy!)
Yup, just as I predicted. I said runaway capitalism is the problem, and you knee jerked right into "he is saying capitalism is the problem."
Yes, I know you probably were home schooled, but your parents should have told you the difference between "x" and "runaway x".
You said "capitalism fails miserably", not runaway capitalism - I don't know what that is anyway, as other commenters pointed out, the US is far from an extreme or runaway capitalist society. You also appear to have knee-jerked into defending the need for a Government; I can't see where I suggested I was an anarchist(!)
The crappy state school education of myself and the other commenters obviously didn't teach us what the technical economic definition of "Runaway Capitalism", so perhaps you could explain to us - preferably without resorting to a car analogy, please.
I would also be curious to know how the lack of chip fabs for everyone is due to greed?
And please stick to the debate rather than ad hominems.
What I found shocking was that you have to pay tax to even legally *watch* TV there...
In most countries, you have to pay tax to do all sorts of things. Shocking.
Good luck building your own fab. Apparently only a trillionaire can afford such simple freedoms.
This is clearly an example where capitalism fails miserably.
What - it's capitalism's fault that building advanced processors requires vast amounts of resources? Feel free to propose your own alternative system where money and fabs grow on trees.
(Uh oh, here come the angry "Capitalism is God, how dare you infidels question the market!" right wing Republo-jihadists with mod points...)
(Well I'll wait for the the angry "Capitalism is the root of all our problems, how dare you infidels defend it!" left wing Communist-jihadists with mod points.)
I have no problem if they want to block hardcore porn, but what about other material that might be deemed "adult" or "offensive to some people who like to complain about it"? And surely we know here on Slashdot that blocking software is often inexact, either mistakenly or unfairly blocking things?
Er, but isn't one of Einstein's most famous quotations "God doesn't play dice with the universe?" - a comment he apparently made repeatedly.
I also say "God damn it" and "Jesus Christ" quite regularly, but I hope people like you won't be taking it as proof of belief in God after my death!
People often use "God" metaphorically, and scientists in particular have often used "God" as a personification of nature, in the same way that someone might refer to "mother nature".
As they say, your right to swing your arm ends just before my nose. Equally, your right to watch stuff on a plane ends when it starts to offend or disturb those flying with you.
In that case, I'm offended by you posting on Slashdot.
So how about this for an utterly radical idea - produce a passport that's in a convenient shape, and harder to forge!
Your argument is no justification for the various compulsory "ID card" schemes that various Governments around the world are trying to implement. People who oppose ID cards are not against standardisation of cards, or against making them in the shape of a card rather than a book(!) - it's the various other aspects (e.g., centralised databases, the cost, being compulsory to own or even carry).
He didn't do that. He used a metaphor - quite a common one at that - it's almost a cliché. I'm quite surprised you haven't heard it before. On second thoughts, I'm not.
If you're making an analogy in order to make an argument, I expect something a little stronger than a metaphor! If you're saying he merely made a metaphor, then his point does not hold in the first place.
Basicaly, MDI (and tabs are a kind of MDI) UIs were invented for a reason, and have their use cases ... grrr...
And i find it irritating that many other applycations switched from MDI to SDI in the last years (eg: ms office, nero)
I agree - similarly, it's annoying that some browsers that support tabs (e.g., Firefox) don't seem to do them as MDI, but use some custom-coded interface which lacks the standard features (e.g., you can no longer resize/rearrange the windows, if you wanted to look at two side by side) - at least, I can't find an option to enable this.
The oddest thing is that I've seen some people claiming this as a benefit - e.g., claiming that Firefox had tabs before Opera, because MDI doesn't count as tabs (now Opera can do tabs either with or without MDI, anyway).
It seems that admins are recently too happy with removing information from wiki, than adding it.
Er, the result of the AfD was Keep...
But I guess that biographies of fictional characters and detailed descriptions of Japanese cartoon episodes have much more important place on wikipedia.
This sounds like a strawman, but direct your criticisms at the submitter of this Slashdot article, who voted Delete, and presumably is unhappy with the result. His summary is misleading - there is no big "argument" about getting rid of proofs - there was just an AfD of a single artice, he wanted it deleted, but the overall consensus was to keep.
In fact, in my experience biographies of fictional characters etc are far more likely to get deleted for non-notability than mathematical proofs.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be.
;) This isn't some great policy wide debate on Wikipedia, it's just the AfD of an individual article. Someone thought it shouldn't be there because of the policy, and the consensus disagreed. Big deal.
Sure - and they already have asked this, and put a lot of thought into it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not , for example. The person who proposed the article thought that the proof made it count as a "textbook", but others pointed out that this didn't fall under "articles which read as textbooks, with leading questions and step-by-step problem solutions as examples".
But I'm curious why this issue is even on Slashdot - perhaps we should ask what sort of site Slashdot wants to be?
In fact, we can see the user Beetle B. voted delete - and now because the result was to Keep, he's running to Slashdot? (Okay, at least he's phrased it as an open debate - but it's not clear that this is some big "argument", and it's not clear a policy is needed specifically for mathematical proofs. Above all, this is the sort of thing that should be discussed on Wikipedia, not on Slashdot...)
Just because LiveJournal sells something doesn't mean people are buying.
Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).
Not me, but people do buy. I don't think there are any official figures, but http://news.livejournal.com/100876.html suggests that the number of permanent accounts sold last time has a lower bound of 1040.
One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change. ...
Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.
I'm not sure what evidence this is based on? On the contrary, to some degree people are locked in, in that you need an account to access all your friends' content, and a new site is only worth as much as who you know is on it.
I don't think I've seen any less loyalty on them than people have with any other site. LiveJournal even sells "permanent accounts" for $150, so there are people coughing up money for a long term commitment, more so than any other website I've seen.
Your statement makes about as much sense as saying the only reason for having a Slashdot account is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Who would go to all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a Slashdot account for any other reason? Look at you with your +5 by writing a trendy bashing of social networking, if that's not attention whoring?
Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitute for the telephone, email or instant messaging.
Okay I'll bite: Why? Email is push rather than pull. Instant message requires everyone you want to address to be online at that moment, and telephone is even worse, being only one-on-one.
The pull rather than push is important - rather than me deciding who would want to read whatever I want to tell them, people I know can decide for themselves. In fact, it's email which is far more likely to represent ego satisfying, validation and attention whoring, in that you send out messages flooding people's inboxes, assuming they care about your petty life. Same with telephone and IM really.
It's sad really, I'd have thought that geeks would be willing to accept that some uses of technology may be more appropriate than others (even if it's not for them, it may be for others), rather than giving in to impressions of what's trendy and what isn't (what sort of technical criticism is "attention-whoring"? That's the sort of thing people take the piss out of MySpace for).
If there's only two people watching an article (you and someone else) and you disagree, get more people involved (there are places to request editors to look it over).
Moderation isn't needed, when you can edit or revert. I'm not sure why marking the best edit or editor is useful? What's important is the resultant article, not which particular edits in the history were the best.
If a straw poll is needed, that can be done on the Talk page - whilst a system to automate this might seem useful, it's important to remember that opinions are also important, not just a simple count of votes.
As for TFA, it states "One has to wonder how reliable an encyclopaedia is when it peddles government propaganda in an almost Orwellian manner"; Seems a bit like FUD to me.
Agreed - the POV in the Wikipedia page was reverted a few hours later. The POV in the Inquirer article is still there, well over a day later, and seems unlikely to ever be changed.
It's only possible for them to find this by digging into the history - how many bloopers could we find in other sources, if their entire history was easily searchable to all?
Without a rating they can't release it. Without a rating no console would even certify it.
Without a rating, it isn't legal to sell it in the UK. This goes way beyond the certification issues in the US.
But anyhow, that was my point - given that they have no chance of making any money if they can't sell it, I don't see how they can be accused of doing it to grab publicity and make a profit, as the OP suggested.
It's their own stupid fault for producing this game in the first place. Censorship is not some new phenomenon, something that appeared after they started work on Manhunt 2. It's a reality and should have been considered before they embarked on this money pit.
I'm not sure how this relates to what I wrote at all. I wasn't given them sympathy because they won't make any money. I was criticising Government censorship (yes, the laws do stem from Victorian times, I'm not sure that's a good thing), and saying I'm glad that some companies aren't willing to self-censor themselves, even though it means risking not being able to sell it.
If Penguin Books hadn't been willing to challenge the UK censorship laws and instead took the attitude "It's a reality and should have been considered before they embarked on this money pit.", we'd still be living in a country where publishing literature risked prosecution under obscenity laws for too many "fuck"s.